Systematic Lexicography

Juri Apresjan unites theoretical linguistics and lexicography to produce a series of dazzling insights into lexical analysis. It will be of interest to lexicologists, lexicographers, students of linguistic pragmatics, and teachers of semantics at all university levels.

This book unites lexicography with theoretical linguistics. The two fields tend to ignore each other: lexicographers produce dictionaries, linguists grammars. As a result grammars and dictionaries are often discordant and sometimes glaringly incompatible. In Systematic Lexicography Juri Apresjan shows the insights linguistics has to offer lexicography, and equally that the achievements and challenges of lexicography provide a rewarding field for linguistic inquiry. The author presents the vocabulary of a language as a complicated system reflecting a specific view of the world. He does so within an integrated theory of language, in which grammatical and lexical meanings, and the conceptualizations underlying them, blend and interact. Each lexeme, he argues, is a point of intersection of various lexicographic types classes of lexemes with shared semantic, syntactic, pragmatic or mental properties, that are sensitive to the same rules, and which should thus be uniformly described in the dictionary. When any lexeme is viewed against the whole set of linguistic rules, new facets emerge, and these reveal, he shows, key characteristics of words that dictionaries do not currently record. Professor Apresjan not only presents an original, unified theory of language, inspired by the Moscow school of semantics. He also works out its consequences and describes the problems he faced in applying it to the description of Russian. The reader will find that travelling with the author through Russian semantic space is both enlightening and entertaining. The books wealth of lexical facts, illuminated by systematic thought, give it unique character and importance: it will be of great interest to theoretical linguists and to all concerned with writing of dictionaries as well as to semanticists and students of Russian.

Juri Apresjan unites theoretical linguistics and lexicography to produce a series of dazzling insights into lexical analysis. It will be of interest to lexicologists, lexicographers, students of lingustic pragmatics, and teachers of semantics at all university levels.

This text unites lexicography with theoretical linguistics, demonstrating the insights linguistics has to offer lexicography and that the achievements and challenges of lexicography provide a rewarding field for linguistic inquiry.

This reader collects some of the best and most useful work in practical lexicography, focusing on the central issues and hottest topics in the field. An essential resource for all students and scholars of lexicography and lexicology as well as professional lexicographers.

The present book is based on presentations made during the IXth International School on Lexicography, “Multi-disciplinary Lexicography: Traditions and Challenges of the XXIst Century”, at Ivanovo State University, September 8–10, 2011, and continues a series of collective monographs devoted to the theoretical and practical problems of lexicography, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2007, 2009 and 2010. The scope of topics discussed in four parts (Dictionary as a Cross-road of Language and Culture, Dictionary Use and Dictionary Criticism, Terminology and LSP Studies, and Projects of New Dictionaries) is rather wide and focuses on burning problems of European, Russian and world lexicography, as well as on projects of new dictionaries. This book will be of interest to theoreticians, practitioners, and students of linguistic faculties.

This comprehensive introduction by two of the world's leading lexicographers presents a course in dictionary-making for publishers, colleges, and universities world-wide. The book takes readers through building a corpus, analysing the data, and writing entries. Numerous exercises show the use of software to manipulate data and compile entries.